My foot sank into the sand.
And the world pushed me forward.
It wasn't a leap. It wasn't a step. It was as though all the strength my body had saved up over an entire lifetime had been released at once — every fiber responding with a potency I didn't know I possessed. That I shouldn't possess. The mark reacted in the same instant. I felt its heat climbing up my skin in living lines, rising up my arms, closing over my torso, descending down my legs — the entire armor covering me again, fitting into every centimeter of my body as though it had never left. As though that were its natural state, and all the rest of the time had been the exception.
And then I noticed the second thing.
The healing that advanced among my creatures — that wave I saw closing wounds and raising bodies across the field — wasn't only in them.
It was in me.
Before, my body fought to keep itself whole. It was a continuous and silent effort, a private war waged beneath the armor: holding everything in place, postponing each collapse, negotiating with the pain. Now, no. Now each crack closed in the instant it opened. Each torn fiber became fiber again before I registered the tear. I was being rebuilt faster than that world could break me.
Everything around me seemed different. The air. The weight. The distance between me and things.
I couldn't care about any of it.
My eyes were fixed on a single point of the field, with the absolute fixation of a predator that has already decided — not the hunt, but its result. All my hatred, every gram of it, every death, every violated wall, every second of terror that army had planted in my kingdom, compressed now onto a single creature.
I advanced toward the great Burman.
✦ ✦ ✦
And it was while I ran that I noticed the impossible.
Everything around me was still.
No — still wasn't the right word. If I paid attention, and some cold part of my mind was paying attention even now, you could see the world was still moving. Only slowly. Absurdly slowly. A hundred times slower than normal, maybe more. An arrow hanging in the air to my left, motionless as an ornament suspended in nothing. The dust suspended, each grain stopped in its place like stars of a sky too low. The flames frozen in the middle of the wall — sculptures of fire that didn't flicker, didn't rise, didn't burn. Bodies caught in the middle of their own fall, suspended between the blow and the ground, without permission to finish dying.
The sound had gone away along with the movement. No scream. No steel. No wind. Just my heart — beating at a rhythm that, in an entire world stopped, seemed almost obscene.
I wondered, for half a second, whether that was how the gods saw the world.
Then I decided I didn't care. Gods observe. I had a target.
That was no magic I knew.
Or maybe it was — and I had simply never come close enough to understanding what magic could really be.
It was as though time had grown tired of happening and was leaving only a minuscule remnant of what it could truly be.
I looked for the screen. For the notice. For the cold letter of the system announcing a name, a cost, a duration — anything that would transform that into a rule, into a resource, into something I could measure and use again.
Nothing.
The Oasis — which made a point of narrating every coin, every stone, every breath of my kingdom — stayed in absolute silence.
I didn't know what that was. I didn't know where it came from. I didn't know how long it would last.
So I didn't waste a single second.
✦ ✦ ✦
I kept advancing.
Enemies appeared in my path — statues of war with spears raised for blows that would never arrive in time, mouths open in screams that hadn't yet been born. The jurassic creatures that accompanied them, just as on Earth, resembled wax statues more than something real of flesh and bone — every scale, every fang, every claw frozen in the middle of a gesture that no longer belonged to them.
The sword created by my mark appeared in the middle of my cut. Not before. Not slowly, materializing bit by bit as it always had. It simply existed in the exact instant the movement needed it — as though it had always been there, hidden inside the gesture, waiting for the cut to reveal itself.
I felt the blade cross necks and torsos with the resistance of warm butter. And the blood didn't come out. The cuts stayed open, clean, dry — waiting. The targets didn't even comprehend that they were already dead. Their eyes remained fixed on the point where I had been half a second earlier, staring at a ghost, without knowing that death had already passed by them and moved on without introducing itself.
It was indescribable.
And then I got close enough to the enormous Burman to discover the most frightening thing on that entire field.
His eyes were following me.
Slowly — a sliding of pupil that would take seconds to cross what would normally cross in an instant — but following me. In that world of statues, where arrows slept in the air and flames became stained glass, Dioscuros still saw me. Still processed. Still fought. It was almost admirable. His arms rose to intercept me, faster than anything else alive on that field, the colossal body wrenching from itself a response that would have been enough against any creature I had ever seen in my life.
Against any of them.
Except against what I had become in those seconds.
✦ ✦ ✦
My objective was simple: the chest. I still remembered that creature's skin — remembered it with my body, not with my mind. The resistance of living rock. The bone that seemed like titanium. Every blow I had landed before had come back to me in the form of pain. So I expected the impact. Expected to feel my bones breaking, my shoulder leaving its place — the fair price, the logical price, for touching a thing of that size.
That wasn't what happened.
The sword didn't stop at the skin.
It didn't stop at the bone.
It crossed through.
There was resistance — I felt it, a thin and continuous pressure running along the blade, like cutting green wood — but it was so small, so insignificant next to what I expected, that the shock was mine. For an instant frozen inside frozen time itself, the one who didn't understand what was happening was me.
The blade descended to the hilt.
And time chose exactly that moment to remember its own weight.
My body collided with his. All the inertia of what I was crashed against the mountain — and the mountain left its place. The two of us flew. Twenty meters, maybe more, the world becoming a blur of sand and fire around us, until the wall received us with a crash I felt in my teeth. It was in the middle of the flight that I noticed Dioscuros's first truly fast movement: his hand closing around my blade, the enormous fingers squeezing the steel, the strength of an entire body born to crush trying — trying — to prevent my arm from finishing the movement.
Too late.
The impact tore the world. And time came back whole, all at once, like a wave breaking over the field.
Sound. Heat. Gravity. Screams.
Behind me, the creatures I had cut in the silence finally understood. The bodies fell all together, in a single collective fall — and the blood the blade had left waiting gushed out at once, an entire harvest toppling in the same second. The whole field seemed to die with a single sound.
And in front of me, pinned to the wall, was Dioscuros himself.
His feet off the ground.
My sword driven through his chest, buried in the stone behind.
Somehow, I had crossed twenty meters of battlefield carrying the body of a titan — and hung him on the wall like a warning.
✦ ✦ ✦
"What the fuck…? ARGHHHHH!"
Dioscuros thrashed. The enormous hands gripped the blade, his entire body contorting against the steel that pinned him to the stone — and each movement only widened the wound itself. It was then that I felt it, through the sword's hilt, rising up my arm like information I hadn't asked to receive:
His chest was beating wrong.
Two hearts. That was what the Burmans carried — two engines for a body that didn't accept stopping. My blade had crushed the first on the way in. I felt its silence on the left side of the steel: a motionless void where a beat had once existed.
But the second…
The second fought.
It beat hard, accelerated, desperate — a heart trying to do the work of two on its own, pumping a body too large, pushing blood through paths the blade had torn open forever. Each beat reached me through the sword's hilt. And each beat was a little weaker than the last.
Dioscuros wasn't dying all at once.
He was dying by halves.
His eyes finally met mine.
And what I saw there was no longer the colossus who had crossed my gate promising extermination. It was the raw and undisguised desperation of someone pinned to a wall, run through by something that shouldn't have been capable of running him through, understanding too late that the world had rules he never bothered to learn.
"Who… are… you?"
The blood ran down his mouth along with the words.
I didn't blink.
"I will kill all who come. And I will protect all whom I love." My voice came out low. Strange even to me — as though another person were using it. "Your mistake was not killing me when you had the chance."
The great Burman still tried to open his mouth one more time.
What came out was only more blood — descending down his chin, down his chest, dripping hot onto my arm. The second heart missed a beat. Then another. I felt each one of them through the steel, like a clock losing its rhythm in the dark.
He didn't look away. Neither did I. I owed him that — or maybe I owed it to myself.
Dioscuros, the giant who broke armies with his own hands, closed his eyes with the last image of this world being a human he had considered too weak to deserve a name.
The second heart beat one last time.
And stopped.
✦ ✦ ✦
"AHHHHHHHHHH!"
The scream tore across the field — and my hand rose on its own.
The fingers closed on air.
When my brain caught up to my body, I was holding an arrow centimeters from my face, the tip trembling before my eye. My body was already cooling, the power draining out of me like a tide going down — but some deep part of me still saw the world fast. Still answered before I did.
"WHAT DID YOU DO?! AHHHHHHH!"
Leda.
The rain of arrows came next — and it wasn't the disciplined volley of an archer. It was overflow. Someone shooting between screams, shooting because their hands needed to do something with that pain. My body bent by instinct, the air whistling where my head had been. Behind me, Dioscuros's body collapsed into the sand the instant I tore the blade from his chest — the gesture so automatic that I only registered it after it was done.
She advanced shooting. The logic was simple and correct: the shorter the distance, the shorter my reaction time. Textbook tactic.
From a textbook that no longer applied to me.
And I saw the exact moment she realized it.
The cadence of the arrows faltered. Her step broke for half a second — the minimal hesitation of a predator understanding, in the middle of her own pounce, that the prey wasn't dodging by luck.
At less than thirty meters, Leda dropped the bow.
It hadn't yet touched the ground when two daggers appeared in her hands — emerging from nothing, as though they had always been there.
Like her brother.
Like me.
"I'm going to capture your heroes and your creatures" — her voice came out torn, liquid with hatred — "and gut them slowly!"
✦ ✦ ✦
Leda was beside herself.
And that was what killed her.
Her blows were fast — faster than Dioscuros's, cuts that buzzed centimeters from my face, their wind scratching my skin. But speed without structure is just desperation with a good appearance. Each arc of the blade was born from hatred and died in the void. None prepared the next. None protected the previous. I slid along her side, reading the pattern before there was a pattern, letting the cuts pass close enough for her to believe she was almost.
The opening came.
My mark ran down my hand and took shape — a dagger twin to hers. A courtesy no one asked for.
I drove it into the side of her body.
Leda kicked the ground and hurled herself backward, opening distance — but the dagger was no longer in her. It was already with me again. Red.
"Why… why… ARGHHH!"
She advanced again.
This time, you couldn't even call it an advance. The pain and the hatred had taken away what remained of technique; she only roared and cut the air, blind, in the hope that one of the blades would find anything that wasn't wind. A warrior of that level, reduced to that.
I didn't give her that satisfaction.
The second dagger was born in my hand and found her throat before Leda noticed her own mistake.
The hatred in her eyes became surprise.
The surprise became something else.
She staggered backward, her free hand rising to her neck, the blood escaping between her fingers. And for the first time since they had arrived at my door, I saw visceral fear on the face of one of them.
"What is it?!" The voice that came out of me, I barely recognized. It was my rage speaking — everything they had made me feel, overflowing all at once. "Come kill me! Isn't that what you wanted?! COME, YOU COWARD!"
Leda didn't look at me.
She dropped the dagger.
The metal touched the sand with a small sound, almost delicate — absurd in the middle of that field. And she turned her back on me.
She began to walk.
✦ ✦ ✦
At first, I didn't understand. My rage wouldn't let me. I wanted her to suffer. I wanted her to keep being afraid. I wanted that terror in her eyes to last long enough to pay for every second of what they did — and she was leaving? Fleeing? After everything, she simply—
No.
She wasn't fleeing from me.
She was going in a specific direction.
My heart clenched before my mind understood. The body knowing first. As always.
Leda crossed the field in steps growing ever more crooked, one hand pressing her throat, the other extended in front of her like someone searching for support in a dark corridor. She passed over fallen weapons without seeing them. She passed her own bow without looking.
Until she reached the body sprawled against the wall.
Until she reached her brother.
"Brother…"
The word came out destroyed — bubbling through the cut in her throat, more blood than sound. She fell to her knees beside him.
"Brotherrr… no… no, no… bro…"
Her feline face came undone.
Leda wept. The tears descended mixing with the blood — hers, his — while the hands that seconds ago held daggers now caressed her brother's face with a care that didn't belong to that field. She tucked a strand of his mane behind his ear. She wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth with her thumb — slowly, with attention, as though he could still feel it. As though there were still someone there to thank her for the gesture.
Then she rested her forehead against his and stayed there, motionless, as though the entire world could wait. Her lips moved. No sound came out — the wounded throat no longer allowed it — but I didn't need to hear to understand. It was his name. Repeated, repeated, repeated. As though repeating were a way of holding someone on this side.
I didn't expect that.
Nothing in me was prepared for that.
And that only made me remember how much I hated that world.
✦ ✦ ✦
They came to my door. They chose to cross my gate promising the death of everything I had built — and they nearly succeeded. Every body on that field had begun with a choice of theirs. I had every reason in the world to feel only the victory.
But the Burman wept over her brother's body.
And my chest tightened.
Because maybe I wasn't looking at two enemies.
Maybe I was looking at the future.
Everyone would have to come to the Oasis, sooner or later. It was the rule. It was the silent sentence hanging over every family of my world: one day, the summons arrives. One day, someone you love crosses a portal and becomes a piece on a board they never asked to play. It didn't matter the strength, the money, or the surname — the door opened for everyone.
My sister could be the body sprawled against some wall.
And I could be the one who arrives too late. The one who crosses a battlefield with hands extended toward someone who can no longer hold them. The one who wasn't strong enough to save.
For an instant — an instant I will deny to the end if anyone ever asks — the face sprawled on the ground wasn't Dioscuros's. It was a face I knew from home. I blinked, and the image went away.
The tightness in my chest didn't.
That was why I came. That was why I took her place — so that this scene, exactly this scene, would never have our faces. And there, watching Leda collapsed over Dioscuros, I understood with a cold clarity that my choice was no guarantee of anything. It was only my wager. Against a world that charged from both sides of the table.
✦ ✦ ✦
My body chose that moment to charge its price.
The cold rose all at once — and with it, the pain. Every muscle screaming together, as though I had run for days without stopping only for everything to explode in a single second. My vision darkened at the edges. My legs trembled.
I didn't fall.
Not yet.
I still had one thing to do.
I advanced toward her. Each step weighed ten. Leda heard — I know she heard; her ears moved in my direction, a reflex older than any pain — and she didn't care. She didn't pick up any weapon. She didn't turn around. She only remained bent over her brother, holding him tighter, her body rising and falling in sobs that no longer had sound.
I stopped behind her.
The sword was born in my hand for the last time that day.
"May you be reborn in a better place."
I ran it through her chest.
Leda shuddered a single time. To the end, she didn't give me her eyes — and I understood, then, that it wasn't fear. It was only that I didn't deserve her last look. That one belonged to someone else. Her hand slid across the sand, slowly, searching — and found her brother's hand. Her fingers closed over his.
Only then did she stop trembling.
I let her body descend slowly onto his.
And I stepped back.
✦ ✦ ✦
The field answered before I did. A light ran through the Burmans' army like a wind sweeping ashes — and where it passed, the soldiers simply ceased to exist, coming undone into particles that rose and vanished into the air. Without their Lords, an army lost the right to exist. Only heroes and creatures had the right to keep living — and theirs, wherever they were on that field, disappeared without my seeing where to.
In less than a minute, no one was left.
Only the wind. Only the smoke rising slowly from the wounded wall. Only me — and two bodies embraced against the stone, and the absurd and unjust silence that comes after a war. The last particles of the undone army passed over me like a snow that cooled nothing.
It was then that my legs gave way.
I fell to my knees in the sand. And right there, alone in the middle of an empty field that seconds ago was the end of the world, I wept.
Not from relief.
Not from happiness.
I wept from sadness. A sadness that didn't choose sides, that didn't ask who was right, that fell over victor and vanquished with exactly the same weight. The Oasis made us do things we didn't want to do. It dressed us as kings and used us as knives. It was kill or be killed — I knew that, I had chosen that, I had been repeating that to myself since the first day.
And even so, my chest couldn't understand.
I looked at the sky of that world that wasn't mine, finally breathing more calmly.
"I'm homesick."